“The Waxworks of Memory” Or the Search for the Meaning of Life in John Banville's The

Beata Piątek Jagiellonian University, Kraków “The Waxworks of Memory” or the Search for the Meaning of Life in John Banville’s The Sea “Since we are haunted now by the idea of being haunted by the past, it is tempting for contemporary novelists to try and come up with new metaphors and analogies for memory, ” writes Adam Philips (2005: 35) in his comprehen sive review of John Banville’s The Sea (2005). The phenomenon that Philips is referring to is succinctly described in an introduction to a recently published volume on theories of memory as a “memory boom” (Rossington and White- head 2007: 5), that is, a recent explosion of memory writing in the humanities and most significantly, in fiction. John Banville is one of many contemporary writers who present their readers with narrators struggling to come to terms with their past experience of trauma. The more or less conscious act of remembering and forgetting plays a crucial role in a large number of contemporary novels. 1 The Sea, Banville’s fourteenth novel, won the author the prestigious Man Booker Prize in 2005, in an atmosphere verging on scandal; in the final round, despite the protests of a group of judges, John Sutherland, the chairman, cast the decisive vote against the other runner up, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (Ezard 2005), which is, significantly, another novel about remembering and forgetting. In The Sea, Banville continues a number of themes which have come to constitute trademarks of his fiction: a solitary narrator dabbling in art history caught in between hope and despair, self-consciously commenting on the shortcomings of the language with which he is trying to express his anxiety (Hand 2002: 4). As Eve Patten (2002) writes: “[rjegarded as the most stylistically elabo rate Irish writer of his generation, John Banville is a philosophical novelist concerned with the nature of perception, the conflict between imagination and reality, and the existentialist isolation of the individual. ” That last phrase, “ex istentialist isolation of the individual” could be used to describe the writing of another Irish author Samuel Beckett, whose legacy is also discernible in Other significant contributions to memory writing have been recently made by Graham Swift, Sebastian Faulks, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro and W. G. Sebald. 262 BEATA PIĄTEK Banville’s preoccupation with human failure as well as his narrators’ obsessive attention to language (Hand 2006: x). As Philips notes, in his recent novels - The Untouchable, Eclipse, Shroud and The Sea, books that seem retrospectively to form a quartet - the narrators have been, in their different ways, successful men who have a sneaking and a not-so-sneaking suspicion that there really is nothing to them. (2005: 35) All the four novels are dominated by internal monologues which attract at tention to the narrators as “voices. ” As the author states in an interview, he considers himself to belong to the oral tradition of Irish writers (Hand and Banville 2006: 1). In the same interview he comments on the structure of The Sea: there are really two books there - one set in the past, that is quite direct and has a pulse that’s like the sea: wave sentences, pulsating, while in the present-day narrative, when Max Morden is talking about himself in the present, the style goes back to that of Shroud. I think it makes for an interesting tension between the two voices. (Hand and Banville 2006: 5) The pulse of the sea is achieved by means of alternating long and short sentences, the poetic efFect is enhanced by alliteration: They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide. All morning under the milky sky the waters in the bay had swelled and swelled, rising to unheard-of heights, the small waves creeping over parched sand that for years had known no wetting save for rain and lapping the very bases of the dunes. The rusted hulk of the freighter that had run aground at the far end of the bay longer ago than any of us could remember must have thought it was being granted a relaunch. I would not swim again, after that day. (Banville 2005: 3) The opening paragraph quoted above contains both syntactic and thematic foreshadowing of the text that follows, the story that dwells on loss, grief and “the gratuitous dramas of memory” (Philips 2005: 35). The pedantically crafted structure of the novel will become apparent to the reader only at the very end, when, in the final paragraph, the gods’ “departure” will reveal its tragic meaning. The role of the reader is to persist in an attempt at making sense of the narrator’s monologue, which is only possible if the reader stores every detail mentioned in his memory and is prepared to fit the relevant elements into the jigsaw puzzle. That is all the more difficult as not all the details are relevant and the narrator’s recollections seem as chaotic, random and unpredictable as “THE WAXWORKS OF MEMORY” OR THE SEARCH... 263 we may expect in a man recently afflicted by severe psychological trauma. Gradually the reader learns to navigate between the two narratives that Max Morden inhabits; he moves between the present account - his stay in a boarding house, where he is trying to recover from the loss of his wife, and the past - his childhood memories of a summer he had spent in the same place. The memories of the summer fifty years before open the text and “swell” like the sea in the first paragraph, so that they quickly dominate the narrative. They are composed of a series of “tableaux, ” as the narrator calls them, each recalled with amazing immediacy and obsessive attention to detail, which may be only explained by the fact that, as Max says, the day he met the Grace family his life “was changed forever” (Banville 2005: 33). By making friends with the Grace twins, Chloe and Myles, the narrator is allowed entry into a new world where he can observe and occasionally even experience directly the middle-class life style; it is an existence so superior to that of his family that the Graces assume divine status in his eyes. He uses the term “gods” with reference to the entire family, he sees the father as Poseidon (123) or Old Father Time (90); Connie, the mother is transformed into a daemon by his sexual desire, and even Myles’s webbed feet are “marks of a godling, sure as heaven” (Banville 2005: 61). The Graces seem divine to young Max because of the way they live; their superior lifestyle is marked by what they can afford: trips to France, renting a house for the whole summer, drinking gin and entertaining guests over the weekend. These become attributes of a world that the narrator aspires to enter; his dream will come true years later when he marries Anna, the daughter of a wealthy crook. The narrative of childhood memories is occasionally invaded by the nar rative of the present; however, the connection between these stories remains rather obscure until the end of the novel. The only point of correspondence is the place, and like in many previous novels by Banville, the house. The Cedars, which the Graces used to rent and endowed with magic qualities, is now a boarding house, run by an eccentric Miss Vavasour, who seems strangely attentive to the needs of her mourning guest. In an attempt at self-fashioning so characteristic of Banville’s unpleasant narrators, Max Morden introduces himself as an art critic writing a book on Bonnard, but that book seems never to get written (yet another failure); instead the narrator is “working the trauma through” for the purposes of self-understanding (Kaplan 2005: 20). In a man ner characteristic for trauma victims, Max Morden represses the actual external event that caused the shock, and focuses on the summer he spent in love with the Graces. 264 BEATA PIĄTEK The two narratives are written in different styles; the childhood memories are extremely vivid, the narrator’s professional interest in art is visible in the images which he reconstructs with loving nostalgia. His recollections are visual and sensual: “I see the game as a series of vivid tableaux, glimpsed instants of movement all rush and colour” (Banville 2005: 125). On another occasion, the narrator comments on the peculiar way in which he remembers: “Memory dislikes motion, preferring to hold things still, and as with so many of these remembered scenes I see this one as a tableau” (Banville 2005: 221), and a little bit further on he uses another metaphor of painting, where his memory is a “wall” on which he paints an image: [ ... ]! mean Chloe and her mother, are all my own work while Rose is by another, unknown, hand. I keep going up close to them, the two Graces, now mother, now daughter, applying a dab of colour here, scumbling a detail there, and the result of all this close work is that my focus on them is blurred rather than sharpened, even when I stand back to survey my handiwork. (224) The Sea is a novel preoccupied with the working of memory and it abounds in metaphors of memory as well as reflections on its randomness and unre liability. Given the dramatic moment in life in which Max is writing, it is understandable that he dwells on the parallels between the past and the present, life and death, memory and imagination. A recollection of a voyeuristic mo ment at a picnic provokes reflections on the nature of reality and mortality which carry allusions to Joyce’s “The Dead”: Which is the more real, the woman reclining on the grassy bank of my recollections, or the strew of dust and dried marrow that is all the earth any longer retains of her? No doubt for others elsewhere she persists, a moving figure in the waxworks of memory, but their version will be different from mine, and from each other’s.

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